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There is a joke in Davos that you know the world is in trouble when international development charities feel the need to start working together but you know things are really bad when different UN agencies go into partnership.

So it may be time to press the panic button after the announcement in Davos yesterday that Unesco is joining forces with the World Food Programme (WFP), Unicef and the private sector to launch a three-year partnership in a bid to improve access to healthcare, nutrition and education for the world's most underserved children.

It's not hard to get ones head around the idea that there is no point having schools if the children are suffering developmental damage from a lack of nutritious food and unable even to get to classes.

Yet the way we have set up institutions is too often to deal with individual issues; in this case Unesco around education and the WFP around nutrition. That's just as true of development charities, which tend to focus on particular issues such as health or water.

On Thursday, I met up with Nestlé chair Peter Brabeck-Letmathe and he voiced the same concern; worry that the thousands of NGOs often fail to relate their individual concerns to the bigger picture. Surely, he believes, they will have a more effective voice if they join together and this would also allow companies to engage with them more effectively?

This new-found enthusiasm for collaboration between and across sectors would have been virtually impossible to negotiate in the past due to a mixture of competition, mistrust and personal egos.

So what has changed? Essentially it's the recognition that an individualist approach, regardless of the size and ambition of the organisation, is doomed to only making a small dent in any problem, and that any progress can be wiped out by challenges faced elsewhere in the system.

More than that, there is a growing understanding in the development and business worlds that everything is "inter-connected," perhaps the most over-used term at Davos this year. It's as though leaders have just uncovered new wisdom, when for thousands of years every mystical tradition has talked about everything being part of the web of life.

This is often represented in the little understood but well known butterfly effect, coined by Edward Lorenz, and derived from the theoretical example of a hurricane's formation being contingent on whether or not a distant butterfly had flapped its wings several weeks before.

This is not to deride the new movement towards co-operation because it is absolutely essential to show the potential of partnerships to create change, because the challenges coming down the tracks, from climate change to resource scarcity, have within them the seeds of terrible conflict.

In the same way that the world missed the opportunity to transition with relative ease to a green economy when the cash was available during the economic boom, we cannot afford to get to the stage where we hunker down, lose our sense of comradeship, and seek to protect what we believe we need to survive.

Protectionism has been prevalent in the world, before the concept of planetary boundaries had even entered the lexicon. Just look inside yourself to see this particular truth. When you next generously let someone in the queue ahead of you at the bus stop, just imagine your reaction if you knew it was the last bus for two days.

One African leader was not joking in Davos when he talked privately this week about the risks of water scarcity leading to a third world war. And that was without factoring in food and energy shortages and price-hikes.

The wish to develop cross-sector partnerships needs to be nurtured and supported but I have my worries about whether they will create the fundamental breakthroughs at scale we so need.

If you go back over the decades, you will see the territory littered with ideas and initiatives that foundered because they did not have firm foundations and were not embedded into key structures.

The issue with partnerships is that they need specific skills to work effectively and NGOs, businesses and UN agencies often lack these and are not consciously developing them.

Companies, in particular, have succeeded – in their terms, using the language of conflict – whether it be conquering new markets or destroying the opposition. Of course, we need some of that testesterone-charged ambition but it also needs to be tempered by the qualities of understanding, sharing and deep listening.

I'll give you an example of how exercising control does not always lead to success. Davos this week may have more concentrated power in one place than anywhere else on the planet, but those leaders who are facilitating sessions are often not very effective in this role, which relies on giving up control, not taking it.

Beyond this, most speeches are from prepared texts and most energy goes into ensuring nothing goes wrong. More concern, for example, goes into the height of the box that UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon stands on so he can see above the lectern than in the quality of the sharing. I exaggerate somewhat, but you get the point.

So how are we going to ensure that these emerging partnerships are given the best opportunity to flourish. Nestlé's Brabeck-Letmathe is very clear that they need to be codified so that they do not rely only on an individual's passion to survive. At the same time he recognises we still need passionate individuals who are prepared to go off script and push for disruptive change.

What is less well acknowledged is the need of businesses, NGOs and institutions to engage a legion of expert facilitators and systems mappers. These experts not only know how to represent complex global issues in an intelligent and approachable way but also have the soft and quiet skills to understand how to bring create a common vision, purpose and strategy among groups who often have conflicting aims and ambitions.